Tag: president

None of his assurances can be counted upon. His talent is bluffing, not delivering results. The president who disingenuously promised to end carnage isn’t going to deliver elsewhere either. He won’t end the opiate crisis. He isn’t going to rebuild the country’s infrastructure. He makes lots of promises that he cannot possibly keep. Often, he’s not even trying.

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Trump’s rhetoric matters. Our public debate is polluted when President Trump denigrates the FBI as “corrupt” or suggests that all immigrants are MS-13 murderers. Trump and his crass team demean the offices they hold. Worse, they lower the standard of discourse. Trump’s defenders either revel in his outbursts or say that they do not matter.

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Trump’s “open source” thoughts are unprecedented in any modern politician. Trump, by breaking from the “offend no one” style of political discourse, still appeals to those Americans who share beliefs with him that are largely overlooked by the incumbent political class that the president is dismantling. His takeover of the Republican Party was a hostile one that paid lip service to most of the party’s ideological dogma. What Trump is about is remaking the American body politic. Trump-speak is a key component of that overhaul, because it allows for the open discussion of the many problems America and the world is facing but are usually only spoken about in whispers behind closed doors.

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“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This is not a way of life at all, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953)

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The choice is stark, unsettling and serious: between what Christians call the “Great Commission” and President’s Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” (MAGA). The Great Commission is racially and radically inclusive, while MAGA, as a matter of rhetoric and reality, is racially exclusive and divisive. Jesus praised a foreigner, an ethnic outcast, and religiously unpopular “good Samaritan” as an example of great compassion.—Cornell Brooks

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Trump and his core supporters see any criticism as betrayal. When the president is thin-skinned and lacks core convictions, there are Christians who are concerned that criticism will cause Trump to dump their issues. An enormous number of Christians — especially Christians in politics — suffer from a lack of faith [and] view the Left as presenting an existential threat to Christian faith. Trump has done a remarkable job at convincing conservative Christians that he’s the lesser evil compared to his enemies in the media and on the radical Left so they’ll find ways to rationalize their support for Trump.

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I just don’t want [President Trump] to be held up as the poster boy for Christian evangelicals because he doesn’t represent most of us. I understand a lot of evangelicals supporting him because of his policies. I’d love to see a Christian leader come out and say that they support Trump for his policies, but that his behavior disgusts them, and he needs to clean up his act. I would love to just hear one of them say that. If they support his policies, they also feel like they have to stay hush(ed) on his behavior and I just feel that it’s sending the wrong message to the world about what Christianity is and what Evangelicals are, or I guess, have become. — Jerushah Armfield

Jerushah Armfield is an evangelical writer, the granddaughter of the iconic evangelist Billy Graham, and Franklin Graham’s niece. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jerushahruth.

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What has alarmed me has been the willingness of my fellow citizens to rationalize the President’s behavior. Yes, the rules have changed for the President. Character DOES matter. You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it. How in the world can 7 out of 10 Americans continue to say that nothing matters except a robust economy? – James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, on the character of the President of the United States (1998)

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Back in the ’90s, when Bill Clinton was sexually sinning, conservative evangelicals fulminated with outrage and insisted that a president’s most important trait was moral character. The word hypocrisy doesn’t begin to describe people who have forfeited moral authority and proved to be as fraudulent as the president they deify. Rev. Franklin Graham said that he loves Trump because this president has “a concern about Christian values.” This is the same Franklin Graham who contended, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal of 1998, that character counts, that a president’s private behavior can’t be separated from his public behavior. Michael Gerson, a principled conservative [said], “The priests have become acolytes … The gag reflex is entirely gone.” They’ve become just another special interest group in the partisan tribe. They’ve shelved their morals to serve a president of abysmally low character, in exchange for his ideological favors. For Trump, there’s all kinds of doctrinal flex. We’re getting the same riff [from] Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the Moral Majority movement founder, who calls Trump “a dream president,” [and] James Dobson, ex-leader of Focus on the Family, who lectured in the ’90s about the “profound moral crisis” of low presidential character.

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When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn’t suit him “fake news,” it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press. Mr. President, every word that a president utters projects American values around the world. — Senator, Jeff Flake (Jan 2018)

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“If a song could be president we’d all have a part to play. All our best foreign policy would be built on harmony. We could all add another verse, life would teach us to rehearse till we found a key change. Break out of this minor key, half truths and hypocrisy.”

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Kellyanne Conway, who would put a finger-gun to her head in private about Trump’s public comments, continued to mount an implacable defense on cable television, until she was pulled off the air by others in the White House who, however much the president enjoyed her, found her militancy idiotic. (Even Ivanka and Jared regarded Conway’s fulsome defenses as cringeworthy.)

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We must never adjust to the present coarseness of our national dialogue — with the tone set at the top. Reckless, outrageous, and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as “telling it like it is,” when it is actually just reckless, outrageous, and undignified. Such behavior projects a corruption of the spirit, and weakness. – Senator Jeff Flake

Senator Jeff Flake is an American politician serving as the junior United States Senator from Arizona since 2013 alongside former 2008 presidential nominee John McCain. Owing to his opposition to U.S. President Trump, Flake announced on October 24, 2017, that he would retire at the end of his current term instead of seeking reelection in 2018.

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We have a James 2:17 responsibility to put our faith into action for voiceless persons. Their issues were ‘unarmed black people being killed by police,’ ‘systemic oppression against people of color, police brutality and the criminal justice system, and President Trump’s referral ‘to us with slurs but the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., as “very fine people.”’ We must serve as mediators and translators between two worlds.

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“Despite the Fake News Media in conjunction with the Dems, an amazing job being done in Puerto Rico. Great people!” – Trumplethinskin

Sheila Sustache, 37, cries and hug her aunt Yasmin Morales Torres, 41, after seeing the damage on their houses torn apart by Hurricane Maria, on Friday Sept. 29, 2017 in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico. Many of the American island territory’s more than 3 million residents are still without electricity, gas and water. President Trump is scheduled to tour the devastation in Puerto Rico on Tuesday. Photograph by Andres Kudacki (@andreskudacki )for TIME0

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“If you are unable to critique a president, you’ve lost your prophetic witness. Furthermore, if you can’t critique, but must also defend him against those who do critique him for obvious missteps, you might want to search your heart and consider the reason.” – Ed Stetzer

Russell D. Moore is an American evangelical theologian, ethicist, and preacher. He is currently president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The so-called Alt-Right white supremacist ideologies are anti-Christ and satanic to the core. We should say so. #SBC17

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